HISTORY

Daoism is an organised religious tradition that has been continuously developing and transforming itself through China, Korea and Japan for some two thousand years. Now it has spread around the globe from Sydney to Toronto and includes among its followers people from a whole range of ethnicities and cultural backgrounds. Day by day, Daoism is truly becoming a world religion, but as it does so, it seems to resist being pinned down in neat categories. Not many people know what Daoism is, and when people do have an understanding of it, often it is quite different from someone else's.

While studies on Daoism have grown very fast over the past few decades, they do not have a distinct identity of their own within the larger academic world, and up to now lack a forum where concerned scholars can debate and further define the state and the future of the field. Thus, the Centre for Studies of Daoist Culture (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) and the École française d’Extrême-Orient have joined their efforts in creating this academic journal: Daoism: Religion, History and Society.